National LGBT Organization Names First Black Woman as Its Leader

National LGBT Organization Names First Black Woman as Its Leader

Aisha Moodie-Mills will be Victory Fund and Institute’s new president and CEO.

Published March 26, 2015

The Victory Fund and Institute, an organization that helps raise money and provide campaign support for LGBT politicians, has tapped Black LGBT advocate Aisha Moodie-Mills as their new president and CEO.

Moodie-Mills will be the first Black and female CEO the organization has had in its 24-year history.

Moodie-Mills come to this new position with vast LGBT and political experience.

Her six-year tenure doing LGBT work includes positions at the Center for American Progress and advocating for the DC Council to pass marriage equality legislation in 2010. Before that, she owned her own consulting firm and worked with the Congressional Black Caucus PAC.

Moodie-Mills told Buzzfeed that her new position at Victory Fund is a sign of change — change that is welcomed given how so many national LGBT organizations are run by white gay men.

“Victory has been thinking about this, certainly before me, and I think I am a manifestation of the forward-thinking of the organization, and that’s a great legacy to be able to build upon,” she said.

She added, “I was impressed that they, as a … not really diverse group — there are only like a handful of women and everyone there is white, so they’re not a very diverse group — how they came to it themselves that they need to do something different and that they needed to think much longer into the future — a 20-year plan — and that this 20-year plan needs to reach people that they’ve never reached before.”

Overseeing a $4 million budget, Moodie-Mills also told Buzzfeed that her first order is to begin strategizing and doing grassroots work in areas like the South, where there are not a lot of LGBT politicians. She hopes that this work will usher in better representation in the city councils and state legislatures.

An out lesbian, Moodie-Mills’s 2010 wedding to her wife Danielle Moodie-Mills was the first Black lesbian couple to be featured in Essence.com’s “Bridal Bliss” column. The 37-image pictorial went on to win the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism — Mutlimedia in 2011.